Tag: IP Address

“Why is it that you always give x.x.x.4 ip address to you first Azure virtual machine? Why don’t you start with x.x.x.1 ?”

This is a very interesting question, and needs to be kept in mind whenever transitioning from On-Premise to Azure. In Azure, there are a few IP addresses that are reserved for system use and cannot be allocated to virtual machines.

The first and last IP addresses of a subnet have always been unavailable for machine addressing because the first IP address is the network address and the last is the broadcast address for the subnet.

In addition to the above, the next 3 IP addresses from the beginning are used by Azure for internal use.

I came across a similar article for AWS. AWS also removes 5 IP addresses from the pool, for internal use. However, this article was more informative in regards to why these IP addresses are unavailable. I have a suspicion that Azure has the same reasons, however I couldn’t find any article on it.

and below is the section that describes why the IP addresses are unavailable in AWS

The first four IP addresses and the last IP address in each subnet CIDR block are not available for you to use, and cannot be assigned to an instance. For example, in a subnet with CIDR block 10.0.0.0/24, the following five IP addresses are reserved:

10.0.0.0: Network address.

10.0.0.1: Reserved by AWS for the VPC router.

10.0.0.2: Reserved by AWS for mapping to the Amazon-provided DNS. (Note that the IP address of the DNS server is the base of the VPC network range plus two. For more information, see Amazon DNS Server.)

10.0.0.3: Reserved by AWS for future use.

10.0.0.255: Network broadcast address. We do not support broadcast in a VPC, therefore we reserve this address.